remarriage of widowed people

‘Til Death


"The Garden of Eden" by Lucas Cranac...

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Most married couples have this romantic expectation of spending eternity together. Buried side by side. Reuniting in heaven. It’s the kind of thing Hollywood makes movies about and Celine Dion warbles at us. But, what if there isn’t an eternity. No physical possibility of lying side by side. And heaven isn’t anymore real than the Garden of Eden?

Something I read on the YWBB got me thinking again about being buried. Someday. After I am dead. I have always maintained that my daughter should be the one to decide the final resting place of my earthly remains. Where I am will matter most to her after all. But, that was before Rob. Where I rest would matter to him as well now.

Dee’s father is buried in a little Catholic cemetery in a little town in Iowa where the bar that he played pool league out of is located. Will didn’t want his ashes scattered to the wind, even if I could have found a way to place him in the end zone at Heinz’s Stadium, because he didn’t want to be ashes. He wanted to be buried. He never specified where though he ruled out a few places most emphatically. Like Pella, where both of his parents are from and his father is buried. He hated Pella, and he didn’t much care for his father either. And Norwalk. The bedroom community he grew up in and considered a splat on the map for the most part – though I suspect he knew if he was buried too close to where his mother lived, she would cover his grave in death swag and bling. He loathed the idea of becoming a shrine like the ones you see along the side of the road.

Economically, a full burial was never an option I could promise him. It was partly luck that I learned of St. John’s and was able to afford to intern his ashes there. His name alone is on the headstone though there is room for mine, I suppose if I planned to stay in Iowa. But that was never the plan, even before Rob, I didn’t see myself here in another year or maybe two.

Will believed that a person’s soul went to heaven when he/she died. He believed that you met God. He told me once that he it would “suck” having to wait all those years for me because he knew I was going to be very old when I died. I told him not to worry that he would have my second husband to keep him company. He didn’t think that was funny, but I never could make him laugh. “You’re just not that funny, babe,” he used to tell me. Ironically, Rob holds much the same opinion of me.

I didn’t save any of Will’s cremains. I buried the container unopened. I literally buried it. With no money it was just me, Katy and the sexton standing over this little hole in the ground. The sexton, a very nice old man who had showed me his own plot the day I went to pick out Will’s, recited the “Our Father” and I placed the urn in the ground myself. I am a bit sorry now that I don’t have some of the ashes to take with me to Canada, but there is nothing to do about it now. As I told Rob when he asked, I am fairly certain there are laws against digging up your dead husband’s urn simply because you’re moving to another country, but to his credit, Rob offered to sneak out there with me under cover of darkness and help me dig Will up. Being arrested for unearthing my dead husband’s remains was not high on my bucket list, so I declined.

Truthfully, I feel only a sense of failure when I visit his grave anymore. It will actually be a relief not to feel obligated. In the beginning I went simply because it was something tangible to yell at or complain to or beg for help. Now it’s just a rock. He isn’t there. He was never there.

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Imagine There’s No Heaven


Red sunset

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“Use your imagination not to scare yourself to death but to inspire yourself to life”

Adele Brookman

Rob sent me today’s quote. It is appropriate and timely for us both. Imagining one’s life, planning the dreams you have dreamed for your future and putting them into action can be overwhelming, but re-imagining the future after your original hopes and dreams have died? Stymied stronger individuals than myself I’ve no doubt.

My imagination’s lowest setting is hyperactive. I can scare myself with relative ease. Probably the years of practice I’ve had. Lately I have been scaring myself a bit with doom and gloom scenarios as I make preparations for moving to Canada and the wedding. Rob reminds me that it is just our heightened widow’s sensitivity that makes us more susceptible to this kind of thinking but also helps us be more compassionate of others too. Kind of like a super-power, although not that cool. Actually it would make a pretty dorky super-power.

I was actually less of a risk taker in the past than I am at present which is interesting given the events of the past few years. I know many would simply be content to shore up the walls around the lives they have salvaged from the wreckage and be grateful for a little peace. But I was just not content. The last months before the first anniversary of my late husband’s death were painful. I hurt for him and me and our daughter, and what we had all been through, but mostly I wanted to move forward. And at that time, I didn’t know where or what to move towards. I only knew what I didn’t want.

There was this urge to imagine a life away from where I was and doing something that was fun and meaningful for a living. In your mind you can go anywhere and I did. Tried on all manner of places that while they might have been comfortable, didn’t fit the way a good pair of jeans do. The difference between comfort and fit is the difference between Old Navy and Lucky Brand. When Rob and I were first friends, he was always quizzing me about where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do with my life. Partly because he is a problem-solver. Me, man. See problem, solve problem. And I love that about men in general, and him in particular, because I problem solve the way I shop for clothes. I browse through all the stores noting styles and colors. A few days later I go back and try things on, and maybe I will buy something but likely not, and after a few days more, I decide and purchase. Impulse shopping lands me with clothes I will never wear, and solving a problem without due thought and sorting is much the same scenario.

I am not sure when Rob went from a man I wanted to find someone just like to a man I was falling in love with, but he changed the staging of my daydreams about the future. And it wasn’t scary. It was, at first, that stomach dropping feeling you get when you go over the top on the Ferris Wheel or look down into the crevices from atop the rocks. Breathtaking. But, as we grew closer, talked more and spent time together; he became the future to me. The place where I knew I should be. The one I was meant for.

People who have never seen us together don’t get “us”. Certainly the way we met invites even the most casual skeptic to voice an opinion, usually negative. There is a song by Brandi Carlile called The Story that almost conveys how I feel:

All of these lines across my face

Tell you the story of who I am

So many stories of where I’ve been

And how I got to where I am

But these stories don’t mean anything

When you’ve got no one to tell them to

It’s true…I was made for you

I climbed across the mountain tops

Swam all across the ocean blue

I crossed all the lines and I broke all the rules

But baby I broke them all for you

Because even when I was flat broke

You made me feel like a million bucks

Yeah you do and I was made for you

You see the smile that’s on my mouth

Is hiding the words that don’t come out

And all of my friends who think that I’m blessed

They don’t know my head is a mess

No, they don’t know who I really am

And they don’t know what I’ve been through but you do

And I was made for you…

Someone on the board wrote about feeling cheated of her time with her husband. How could he have been put in her life only to be taken away so soon? And then someone pointed out something to her she hadn’t thought of before, perhaps she had been put in his life. An interesting twist. We think of our spouses as forever because we have such a limited grasp of the concept. Our forever is really here and now. The time we are allowed with our spouses is probably even more finite because if I am here moving forward with Rob then what is Will doing? For some reason the image of him sitting on a cloud and plucking a harp waiting for me just doesn’t seem plausible. A Creator who could envision a sunset, much less create one daily, does not live in a cotton candy Christian heaven.

It is amazing where or to whom the imagination can lead you when it is free from fear and open to the possibilities. Eternity is bounded by the limits of what we can imagine. As John Lennon once said, “Imagine there is no heaven.”

Selling the House


a nice starter home

Image by girl_onthe_les via Flickr

I came home this afternoon to a “For Sale” sign in the yard. I had actually been a bit worried about my reaction. This was the house that Will and I wanted to make a home out of. Have another baby in. Live the future we had planned. None of those things ever came to pass. It is still just a house. There is no baby and never will be. Ironically we’d never had even the slightest chance at a future from the day we first met because he was already dying.

 

There was a message waiting on the machine already from the realtor who had found the buyer for our last house asking could he bring clients by later and could I call him to confirm. I decided to take that as a good omen.

 

I would love for this house to be sold in a matter of weeks. It has held me prisoner long enough. It was meant to be someone else’s home and future, I think, and I have just been “keeping it warm” for them. But I am realistic enough to know that finding a buyer in the current market could take a while and, regardless, we are leaving for our new home in Canada with Rob mid-June.

 

All this packing and realtor stuff has brought back memories of selling the last house and all that was going on at the time. The house we were living in was mine. I had bought it the summer before I met Will. I loved that house. I loved the area which was the original part of the suburb we live in. The neighborhood had been flooded out in 1993 and the house on my lot torn down and replaced with the tiny starter home I ended up buying. It was just a couple of blocks from the old shopping district. I could walk to the farmer’s market on Thursday evenings and over to the post office. There was a walking path not too far off that I did my daily running on. I had an old-fashioned front porch where I would sit on the steps and listen to the trees whisper to the skies on windy evenings in the summer.

 

When Will moved in, we put in a brick patio in the back and grilled out with friends on the weekends. Actually, we grilled all the time as soon as the weather was warm. He loved to grill. The epitome of the male stereo-type if you want to know.

 

We decided to sell and find a bigger place when our daughter was about 9 months old. Will was already quite sick but we were still choosing to believe the doctors who told him that it was stress and depression. I am not sure I ever really believed that but I know that by the time we had begun the process to sell the house, I didn’t believe it at all.

 

The house sold the weekend of July 4th. It had only taken about 4 weeks. By the end of that week, he had been placed on leave because of two accidents he had with his cube van. Ultimately they would fire him, but at the time I was so angry with him for keeping his troubles at work from me. I still sometimes wonder what he was thinking then but I doubt he had any clear comprehension of what was happening by that point as he was just weeks away from the point of no return physically and mentally.

 

The day we moved I had to forge his signature on some of the documents because he couldn’t really write anymore. It was obvious to anyone who talked with him, looked at him even, that he was very ill. Moving day was a blur of people and an overwhelming desire to throw my baby into my car and drive as fast and as far away as I could get.

 

I had loved this house the first time I had gone through but from the moment we were moved in all I wanted was to leave. I didn’t hang pictures on the wall. I stacked unopened totes and boxes in the basement that are still sitting there today. I just knew somehow that this was not permanent.

 

Selling feels right though I can’t deny that it is stirring up memories of times past. Feelings of being overwhelmed, helpless, lost, cheated, trapped. Not good times. But, they are just memories.